The Analysis of 20:30 (Bisto-Si) News Headlines: Linguistic Properties and Attractiveness of News

The aim of the present study is to investigate ‘20:30 (Bisto-Si) News’ headlines as one of the most watched news programs in IRIB television. This corpus-based, quantitative- and qualitative-based study analyzed the news headlines collected within one month from the 2nd December, 2015, to the 1st January, 2016. The corpus consisted of 186 news headlines in various national and international issues. This study aimed to find out what linguistic properties in the headlines make the 20:30 news the most watched TV news program. The findings of the research show that the linguistic properties of these headlines can be described into three categories: 1) Semantic properties like metaphor, metonymy, idiom, proverb and synesthesia as well as a reference to famous poems or quotes; 2) Lexical properties such as associative collocations, lexical repetitions and versification; 3) syntactic properties such as verbless sentences and nominalization. Moreover, the results show that although the three categories play an important role in making the news program attractive, the semantic property was found to be the most influential linguistic properties of the 20:30 News headlines.